A blog devoted to Reno's economic recovery

The great indoors [Includes video of desert-grown fish]

After eight months of construction and growing, the startup Which Came First Farm between Reno and Pyramid Lake just sold its first crop of herbs and leafy green vegetables.

They were grown indoors.

“We built it specifically for the quality of food for our own families, and it’s grown to fill a gap in availability of local food year-round,” said the farm’s manager, Greg Jones.

Restaurants, food distributors and residents want more locally grown food, but one problem is the harsh conditions in Northern Nevada that leave a limited window for growing traditional crops, as well as a limited variety of crops.

Young tilapia swim in a tank. When they are mature, their droppings will be used to fertilize vegetables at an aquaponics farm named Which Came First Farm between Reno and Pyramid Lake. (Marilyn Newton/RGJ photo)

They were sold through the Great Basin Food Co-op’s DROPP program. The acronym doesn’t quite match, but it stands for Distributors of Organic & Local Produce & Products. It aims to connect Northern Nevada farmers with restaurants and institutions.

The Which Came First Farm has an aquaponics system where the plants are grown in water with zero soil.

Basically, there is water containing a hardy fish called tilapia. The fish waste puts nutrients into the water, which is circulated to plants in grow beds. There’s a filter in the process that removes the solids, and the water is recirculated.

“With aquaponics, we’re trying to create essentially a wetland ecosystem,” he said. “Plants have symbiotic relationships with other organisms just like we do. Plants depend on other microorganisms to feed effectively, so we’re trying to ensure beneficial microbiology is thriving all the time.”

Not only will the plant crops be sold for food, but when the fish get big enough, they’ll be sold for meat.

According to the New York Times, Americans ate 475 million pounds of tilapia in 2010, four times the amount a decade earlier.

Jeremy Sallaberry, left, and Jake Meaders work inside a Which Came First Farm greenhouse that features an aquaponics system where fish waste and water feed plants. Then both the fish and plants are sold for food. (Marilyn Newton/RGJ photo)

“Known in the food business as ‘aquatic chicken’ because it breeds easily and tastes bland (not fishy), tilapia is the perfect factory fish; it happily eats pellets made largely of corn and soy and gains weight rapidly, easily converting a diet that resembles cheap chicken feed into low-cost seafood,” the Times wrote.

Jones said another advantage of the system is that most crops go from seed to harvest in 52 to 55 days. This gets a quicker return on investment, but it also allows the farm to switch quickly to more arugula or kale if needed.

“Because we’re year-round and can change easily,” he said, “we’ll change to whatever the demand is monthly.”

Jones said this system works great in the desert.

“Water is not lost into the ground,” he said. “It’s simply circulated through the system, so the only water you lose is to the plants and a small amount of evaporation.”

O’Farrell said this recirculation system means “we will reduce our water usage by at least 75 percent and possibly as much as 90 percent.”

Indoor agriculture “won’t solve all our problems, but it’s a very good opportunity for small-scale entrepreneurial farming and does address one of the challenges in maintaining farmland with water rights and water requirements in the desert,” he said.

“But that’s still a multimillion-dollar economy in Northern Nevada, so capturing any part of that market keeps those dollars in the community,” O’Farrell said.

Ripe for growth

Mark Estee of Campo in downtown Reno — one of America’s best new restaurants, according to Esquire magazine — is excited about the prospect of indoor agriculture.

“I think, or I should say I know, here in Northern Nevada specifically that people care about where their food comes from,” he said.

“They want local, organic (non-genetically modified), healthy food. And with indoor agriculture, we can control our food sources more — and a byproduct is that we know where it comes from. It keeps money here. And it puts us in a position to control our destiny as we look for produce and products.”

That said, indoor agriculture and local foods won’t work for everything.

“I’m a restaurant guy,” he said. “I buy prosciutto from Parma, Italy, and I only buy it from there because that’s where the best comes from. I could make my own, and there’s a place in the Midwest that makes excellent prosciutto, but I want Parma prosciutto.”

Estee doesn’t want to use indoor farms for out-of-season produce. Instead, he would want seasonal vegetables grown indoors, but ones that come from Nevada instead of out of state.

“I want the money to stay here,” he said. “It makes business sense, it makes community sense, and it promotes Northern Nevada because we have a great food community.”

Distributor perspective

Even if Estee doesn’t want tomatoes in winter because he prefers to cook with in-season produce, Mike Catalano does get such requests.

He works for US Foods’ Reno branch. It’s a distributor that delivers food — local and national — to restaurants and health service centers such as hospitals and senior living facilities.

“I get calls in the dead of winter saying, ‘I wish we had local produce here now,’” he said.

“If you could grow in the winter months, you would put people to work doing planting, growing, picking, maintenance. I think it would definitely be good for Northern Nevada. The local-food movement — it’s not a trend anymore, it’s pretty much the norm now.”

Nicola Kerslake is one of the people behind the conference, which aims to provide a practical guide to educate people how to do indoor agriculture on whatever scale they want.

“In this state, we have ideal conditions for this kind of thing to expand,” she said. “It uses 10 percent of the water of traditional farming.

“And we have premium products that are already used and that lend themselves to hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics. Basically, five products make up 80 percent of our diet, but in Las Vegas — and Reno has the same situation as well — we have casino visitors from all over world who think their local diet will be met in the city, from saffron to very specialized kinds of microgreens and all kinds of different products considered exotic.”

All of that is currently imported, but much of it can be grown here indoors.

“It’s a great opportunity for farmers to substitute for imports,” she said.

Kerslake gave the example of hydroponic basil grown by Hydro Greens in Pahrump. She said it’s so fresh and flavorful that chefs on the Las Vegas Strip use only a third as much basil as they’re used to.

A microloan project will be announced at the conference to help farmers pursue indoor agriculture. Even five years ago, Kerslake said, the required equipment was cumbersome and expensive, but it’s much easier to take a chance on it now as solar energy and lighting costs have come down.

She emphasizes that indoor agriculture is not intended to replace traditional farming. Instead, she thinks it will relieve stress for Nevada farms by allowing them to grow at additional times of the year.

“Nevada is looking to diversify its economy, and this is a great idea,” he said. “Fallon and Reno are great growing areas. Think of all the restaurants in Vegas and Reno that could use this. If (farmers) could make this (produce) affordable and the operations energy renewable and not have to worry about water as much as normal, it makes sense to me.”

Nevada indoor agriculture conference

The Nevada Indoor Agriculture Conference will be all day Wednesday, April 24 at Historic Fifth Street School in downtown Las Vegas.

The Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development (diversifynevada.com) and Seedstock (seedstock.com), a social venture aimed at fostering entrepreneurship in sustainable agriculture, will co-host the event. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Desert Research Institute are also key participants.

The conference will offer advice to those interested in growing food indoors on a commercial scale and will speak to how this fits in with Nevada’s desert environment. Representatives from Campo restaurant and Hungry Mother Organics will be panelists.

Here in Indiana we want to diversify our income as well by doing some better than organic vegetable farming. Aquaponics is hopefully going to drive down the costs of eating healthy. We have a lot of great recipes for tilapia at tilapiarecipe.org.